Stained Steel: ESOPs, Meta‐Power, and the Ironies of Corporate Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case study examines the situated interactions between management and workers during a proposed sale of stock by a U.S. steel manufacturer. Our focus permits a fine‐grained analysis of how varieties of meta‐power both condition and are contested in situated interactions. In our setting, the workers owned the company through an employee stock ownership plan, thereby confounding the traditional hierarchical relation between management and workers. While the contrast between these forms of social organization framed the boundaries for subsequent social interactions, it also served to animate conflicts between workers and management. We found that though the worker‐owned company proclaimed values of “corporate democracy” and “employee participation,” executive management acted as a relay to transmit the disciplining effects of “market forces.” Accordingly, the latter served as an “invisible proxy” reinforcing traditional hierarchical social relations that problematized worker participation. The ironies of corporate democracy abound when worker‐owners find themselves shadow boxing anonymous capital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".